The other evening I was “hanging” with my family while Donna and Claire were off at her parent’s, and my father was having his annual Christmas dinner for the girls in his office. Partners are strictly forbidden unless you are a part-owner and because of his own self-imposed rule, his own son wasn’t permitted to attend. I was with my mother in South Side near the restaurant already due to shopping but I wasn’t allowed because then the girls would bitch about their boyfriend/best friend/father of their child who couldn’t come along. I told my mother it was all ok, and that I was going to walk the streets of South Side since it was my old stomping grounds. She gave me her bus pass and sent me on my way. If you know South Side this next part’ll make sense. If not, that’s why Google made Street View.

I walked from the Hot Metal Bridge area near Cheese Cake Factory down to Primanti’s at 19th Street. Primanti’s is a staple of Pittsburgh, and I got my favorite Pastrami no tomatoe add egg extra cheese and a Yeungling. Yum! I wolfed down the food, pulled my hat over my ears and kept going. It was dark out, and I had called my sister to meet me after work near the mall by my parent’s where the trolley terminated. At 14th street I walked into The Beehive where I use to spend almost every evening when I was in grad school and some years in high school; it’s changed a bit since then, but it always has memories for me. I got a coffee to warm up, shot some photos of my DSLR shoved in my coat, and walked outside. I stopped across the street where there use to be a bank that was now a bar. After 20 minutes of waiting and tweeting from my phone to record my journey, the bus came. I flashed my mum’s pass and road down towards Station Square.

After jumping from the bus, I ran across East Carson to the trolley. I shot some photos while waiting 10 minutes for the trolley to the Village. Then I went to send another message, but no phone. Uh oh. No PHONE! I checked my pockets. Got my iTouch, point&shoot, wallet, bus pass, Canon, scraps of paper, gloves, and hat. NO PHONE! Trolley came. I didn’t get on. I let it pass by me, and I retraced my steps back across the busy road, looking for a smashed BlackBerry in the road. Nothing. I looked at everyone on a phone and wonderered. Then I walked back up the trolley ramp. The next one came. I got on. I’d given up. I sat down and waited for my stop 20 minutes later.

Across the aisle was a lady chatting away on the phone about only God knows what, and when she hanged up I asked if I could use her phone to call my ride. She agreed but then her stop came up as it rang. I handed it back, and thanked her. I sat there wondering if my sister, Meghan, would be there to pick me up in the cold winter night. I finally walked to the front of the train and asked a man if I could use his BlackBerry; he agreed.

I called Meghan, she answered, and immediately said “they found your phone!” My heart lept. I told her I was close and almost there. She said she’d been waiting. I jumped from the trolley after wondering if I had to shell out hundreds for a new phone and climbed into her car. She told me the bus driver had my phone and it’d be at the Collier Garage after midnight. I asked where the hell the Collier Garage was. Meghan said it was in Bridgeville, which wasn’t far from my parent’s new place. I texted my mum from Meghan’s phone and since she use to live in the area, said she’d drive me later.

At 11:40pm we left for Bridgeville and I walked into the Port Authority Transit dispatch at midnight with my ID card. As the man handed over my phone, he said no one usually picked up lost and found that quickly and he wished me a Merry Christmas.

Yes Virigina, There still are nice people in this world.

Last year several of my tech geek friends kept talking about this PodCampAZ thing, and I said “well that’s not really for me since I don’t podcast that much” (Been trying to this year, but it’s a shot in the dark). I didn’t pay much attention, and I didn’t want to pay for another conference. I like the ones where I present and they don’t make me pay since I am presenting. Others cost too much. Of course, I did no research.

Suddenly it was November and I was home with my kid. It was a Saturday afternoon and the tweet feed exploded. Suddenly all my friends were talking about this phenomenal conference in Phoenix, and I was jealous. Why wasn’t I there? By dinner time I was itching to get out of the house, and people began to converge on Chino Bandido’s in Chandler. I told the wife to watch the kid, I was going out. I got there, checked in on Brightkite (as I do anytime I go anywhere) and waited for my few friends to show up. Suddenly my phone began to beep. Other people were checking in. People came into the restaurant in droves. They looked like me. Acted like me. I didn’t know them.

Suddenly what I thought was a small geek community in Phoenix was much much larger. I also realized that this PodCampAZ thing was for real, and I was missing it.

By Sunday morning I was at PodCampAZ, in my new, cool t-shirt and ready to rock ‘n roll. I spent a great day with all of these people, and quickly registered for PodCampAZ 2009. Next up was the call for presenters. What did I want to say? I had to say something? Why just sit there and not share? Something. Anything.
I found new ways this year to contact parents and communicate through the high school community as a teacher who is obsessed with technology, but as a parent I knew too few teachers thought like I did. Therefore, my market was both. Here’s Devon the teacher. Here’s Devon the parent. Which are you? Come find out. My proposal was accepted and I even get to present on my birthday! Woohoo! I am ok with that, since I’ve done it before in a former life.

So here are the basics for the conference, and I hope you can join us. It’s free. The only pre-req is to have fun, and if you have something to say, well then say it. I will see you there. Come say hello.

PodCampAZ is at the University of Advancing Technology on Baseline Road (just past Fry’s Electronics for all of us geeks out there). It’s next week November 14 & 15 (wow, I will be 35. Odd.) Some of the people will include YOU (yeah, you). … and New media innovators, enthusiasts, participants, and newbies who are interested the role of the internet in interactive communication. It really is two crazy cool days of learning, sharing, and people meeting. And Phoenix metro is gorgeous in November. An the coolest part is, it’s free!!! Totally free. But you could buy a t-shirt and support @podcampaz for years to come.

So here’s the skinny from my buddies around the valley who wrote the media kit for this event:

It’s that time of year again – PodCamp AZ is coming to the University of Advancing Technology November 14th and 15th! PodCampAZ is a FREE networking media unconference, dedicated to blogging, video blogging, podcasting, social networking, and all other relevant media. At the heart of the unconference is the opportunity to have a conversation at large with those innovators which have created a successful blend of relevant media and put it to work for them. Speakers will address emerging trends and best practices on everything from print and radio to mobile, interactive web, and in real life information exchange. During PodCamp sessions, attendees are free to drop in, listen and learn about what is relevant to their needs, and if they choose to, move on to other sessions. You can also become an interactive part of the experience by sharing your knowledge as a speaker or stimulating ideas and asking questions as an active attendee.

If you are an established or aspiring blogger, podcaster, video blogger, or social media advocote and want to meet hundreds of people with the same interests, head over to podcampaz.org to get more information about this exciting event. And above all else, register to attend PodCamp AZ!

Other Links and Topics
If you want to go beyond the basic information, there are several areas that we currently focused on developing. We’d love you forever if you picked one or two to highlight in your article/cast to help us spread the word.

• Sponsorship – We are actively seeking sponsors for everything from rooms to metals to after-parties. Find information about sponsor levels and contact Paul Valach sponsors@podcampaz.org.
• Speakers – We have an awesome speaker lineup already, and are still taking submissions, but only through Saturday. The schedule gets published Monday! If you have questions, contact Sheila Dee and Lawrence Riddick at greenroom@podcampaz.org.
• PodCast AZ – Every year we have live podcasting throughout the entire session. Contact Dani Cutler and Dan and CJ Feierabend at onair@podcampaz.org to get on the airwaves.
• Volunteers – We’ll need a small army of people to help on event days. We might even have some cool swag for you, like a t-shirt and other unidentified stuff. If you want to march in our army, contact Crystal O’Hara at volunteer@podcampaz.org.
• Tees – We have 600 t-shirts to give to registered attendees, and over 500 people are already registered. If you want in on the goodness, get registered.
• This year, there will also be a monitored Help Desk area to handle your issues as they arise.

Registration
Registration is open. Please make sure you link to the registration page. The event is free to attend, but not free to put together, so we have a pre-registration and donation option.

Graphics
For all your official PCAZ 2009 graphics desires, see our digital swag.

And one three last things…

1. We’ve created an awesome overlay for your Twitter avatar. Add it, or we’ll sic Chuck’s Chihuahua on you!
2. We’ve set up public Google Waves for each day. Search tags:podcampaz (inside of Google Wave) to ride the wave!
3. We’ve got Facebook flair to flair your profile and send to friends. (Include images on blog post.)

   http://apps.facebook.com/getflair/viewflair.php?id=11386354&ts=profmain
   http://apps.facebook.com/getflair/viewflair.php?id=11385790&ts=profmain

   http://apps.facebook.com/getflair/viewflair.php?id=11386354&ts=profmain

So as we all know, Oprah is on Twitter. Jen Anniston dumped John Mayer because he tweets too much. Ashton and Demi live their relationship there now. I am not getting into the cultural theory behind this shift in this Web 2.0 tool, but i am more interested in the negative perspective of Twitter now that it’s hit “mainstream”. It was once for geeks like us, and now it’s everywhere. There’s a proliferation of Twitter in Hollywood/celebland and also in the younger gen. I don’t know who all is on here but I teach high school full time and knew my audience here (i.e. Twitter) was NOT my underage public school students but now it has become that. And no, I do not publicize me on Twitter at school. So I wanted to see other people’s perspectives on this. Today I posted something about Twitter and a former student replied that Twitter is a problem solution made for a problem that never even existed … (yeah, I don’t know either) but I am getting these ignorant people who only know about @mrskutcher or @oprah because it’s all over the news and then comes to judge me as if I didn’t love the band before their hit record, if you get my drift. Any thoughts?

Hey you! Yeah, you. The owners of Karate clubs, gymnastic gyms, indoor pools. Yes, the people who own and run the places where you want us to bring our children. The places where you want us to spend our money. I got an idea for You. Wireless. Free WiFi! Tonight I was at Karate with Claire, and there are five networks I can hit from there. They are all locked. At SwimKidsUSA they have a network IN THE BUILDING and NO Access!! Nada. Bummer.

I bet you’d get more business if you had these things set up and turned on. Most businesses have internet now, so add a wireless modem for less than $100.00. Open it to customers (you can password it if you want, and just tell customers the password. Change it monthly if you want.) If I convince one more parent to bring their kid here because they can work while the kid takes classes, I just made you about $100.00 a Month! They do one class at a place like SwimKidsUSA, they’re stupid not to add another for half price, which bumps them to almost $100. This is monthly, guys! Consider it. I know I’d sit there longer and let my kid play more, get her more into your programs so she wants to take more classes, which makes me give you more of my money. Think about it.

I’ve talked elsewhere about the fact that today’s generation has essentially been born with keyboards & mouses (mice doesn’t sound right here) fused to them. My 21 year old cousin had his hands on a keyboard from the age of 5; he’s now a web designer. Our kids today know a language that didn’t exist when we were young. They don’t know writing on typewriters and mailing letters in odd large metal blue mailboxes. They’ve never needed quarters for payphones.

As for my own child, she enjoys shopping at the Apple store (preferably at Chandler Mall). We’re there often. (Mama says too often.) I will never own PCs again, and we’re quickly becoming a MAC family. Claire loves to play with the Macs at the store. Today she wanted to play the 5-7 year old games, and then she was excited, called me over, and showed me that she’d typed her own name. WOW.

As you can tell, if you’re here we have a whole new look. Mostly that’s my fault because a) I didn’t think outside the box, and b) I can get lazy. Be patient with me as I tweak this design.

See, when I began this journey of blogging I was in blogger back before Google bought it. I knew nothing, and I am still far from a CSS guru. I had a little blog, but I wanted more. We wanted to make mad money for blogging like Heather Armstrong does (maybe not mad money but she lives on it!) At the time Movable Type seemed like the way to go, but I didn’t have the time to learn MT. When I realized they had their own little powerful (remember this was before you had control over blogger) blog system, I was ready to jump on board. It was $14.95 a month, and we agreed. MT was what Heather and Jon used, so it must be the way to go we thought.

We logged into TypePad and created an account. Bought the domain Nooccar.com and off we went. Donna, who I think is wildly hilarious, slowly fell off the blog wagon as I plugged away. Life happens and I could never blog as much as Heather (but hey I have a day job!). Even when it was that life I wanted to blog about, it didn’t happen as much as I wanted but we keep going. I know people read it because my Mum references things, my mother in law emails us responses, and my friend at work tells me she already knows everything about me. So that was that. I kept going.

Somewhere along the line I also bought www.dcamd.com for work and for my more professional proclivities. I have my own space and learned about something called Word Press. I’d seen it on my cpanel before, but I really didn’t realize what it was all about. I didn’t think much about it until I began hanging out with several techie people who love (read adore beyond word!) Word Press as a blog platform. I quickly flipped my dcamd.com domain into a Word Press blog and learned how to customize it for what I wanted.

As some point down the line my wife was trying to figure out why she was paying $14.95 for TypePad and another $14.95 for my webserver space. Couldn’t I put them together somehow? I was scared to do this, but my friend Alan said it shouldn’t be too hard. I really didn’t want to lose years worth of blogging now. Eventually, I got online with my Host Gator, my hosting service, and asked how I could get a deal on a 2nd domain. They said since I owned whatever level service that I have, that I could add-on a domain for free! They sent me the video tutorial link, and I switched the DNS servers. My wife about had a cow when www.nooccar.com took us nowhere, but I just giggled and told her why. After 24 hours of waiting, the site was propagated and it was time to try to import our TypePad blog. Exporting it from TypePad was pretty simple, and it went to text file with all sorts of formatting. I then installed Word Press and went into the settings. I found the import command, chose my file and clicked “OK!”. After a few minutes everything looked good. I could pull into the pages and all my pictures from Flickr linked correctly, but anything I uploaded directly to my TypePad account obviously wasn’t there. I’ll need to fix them later. Next it was time for a theme. Word Press is cool because there are thousands of free themes all over the web. I knew I wanted a static width, 3 column theme that linked pages across the top (not categories sinc I have so many!). I did pick that had categories across the top and it was terrible for my need! I looked and looked and looked some more until I discovered www.jauhari.net/. He had really nice themes and my idea of design meshed with his. I found this one, and I uploaded it to my server. Now I know it’s not perfect, and I still haven’t done any widget tweaking and didn’t change the graphics yet, but hey, it’s here.

Stop back and check it out.

Ok world here’s a post. A doozy it’ll be. Wow. Today was bad. I was reading Claire a book in the doctor’s office about some little boy who had a terrible, horrible, really bad day, and compared to mine, his was a skip in the sun. Now I know people have worse days in their lives than today. No one died. No one got ran over. No car wrecks. But still pretty bad.

I’ll break the first rule of what a day is now by saying this, in part, began days ago or weeks ago, but I am getting ahead of myself here (or is it, behind myself?)… anyway, Donna’s had a cold-ear infection-sinus-thingy going on, and she got me sick. Yesterday I was terrible, and Claire and I took off from work early to go to the doctor’s. He said my sinus infection was still there and gave me Augmentin. Needless to say I was just on Cipro for a week, which did nothing for me. Nada. No deal. I thanked him, picked up my pills, popped one and went to bed.

By that evening Claire was hacking up a lung. Even few minutes she’d run into her bathroom to spit up in the toilet. I gave her her treatment before bed and her temp was 100. She’s been doing treatments since early June, and we’re all getting a little sick of it! I am going to buy stock in the doctor’s office!

I’d been to the doctor’s with her on and off since June, and the last time Nikki told us she’d have the girls call the allergist. After a week of not hearing back from the referral department, I began calling them. A week later someone from the office called me! Craaaazy. Yes, I was frustrated. Now it’s two weeks out and finally they got her an appointment for later this week.

So now come 745AM I want to call the pediatrician to get her in, but I know they’re not open that early. I figured I’d wait until 8AM. After 8AM I called and the message said they’d open at 9AM. I was like "who opens their offices at 9?!". I knew it was a mistake and remembering Nikki saying something about their VM message being wrong months ago. I kept calling and finally at 9:02AM it went through! They said that Nikki could see her at 9:40AM, so we rushed over there. Donna met us there because she feels like the kid’s been popping antibiotics like candy for 2 years. We were looking for something different. A diagnosis, rather than a treatment.

We got there and the doc came into the room. I figured since it’s been ongoing for so long, that they’d have her look at Claire. She told us some different info, but also a lot of the same.  They had her do a treatment to open her up, which I knew would work, but does the kid gotta take treatments everyday forever? Then they sent us off to the ENT. They called over there immediately and got us in!!!

We hit lunch and then the ENT who told us Claire needed her tubes put back in. See Claire had tubes when she was 1, and now they wanted to redo them. There’s so many different schools of thoughts on tubes, that you never know for sure and now he wants them back in. We have a concern about hearing loss since she’s had ear infections for more than half of her life, now! He wants us to do an ABR test which will conclusively tell if her hearing is ok, and if not, how bad is it?  We acquiesced to the test and left with an antibiotic (ask me anything! I am an antibiotic expert!).

On our way out, I snapped at my wife. So that left a bad taste in both of our mouths. I popped in a DVD (since Claire fell asleep in the car), and the damn speaker was making horrid noises. One speaker’s been messed up in the last few days, so I was just annoyed it was still doing it. I checked all the connections and even slipped the unit out of the tv cabinet to check the wires. Nothing. Nada. Still bad.

Began to consider dinner, but then remembered one of our stove burners doesn’t heat up anymore. We’re down to 2 1/2. Was thinking of doing laundry, but then I remembered our washing machine screams louder than a fire alarm when I try to put on the rinse cycle. Sounds like a ringtail cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and the thing won’t turn. Damn.

Finally gave up, plopped my butt down and did very little. Donna called later and wanted a second opinion. I figured she wasn’t talking about the washer, the tv, or the stove. Maybe it was on marrying me in the first place, but then I decided it was about Claire’s tubes.

My first inclination was NO WAY. NO HOW. Nikki rocks. We love her. The doc is great, too. The ENT is their friend. Nice guy! I wouldn’t want any of them to think we don’t value them. And if we wanted a second opinion, then we’d need to gather records. Damn.

Then I wondered. Worse case scenario, is whatever we (Donna and I) decide affects Claire FOREVER, and somewhere down the line our daughter (who worse case scenario wears hearing aids all her life) asks us why we didn’t get a second opinion on redoing tubes, and we gotta tell her, cause we liked the doc a lot? Well, that sure don’t fly with me.

So now I need another ENT appointment, I gotta take her to the allergist appt (which I was finally able to get), buy a new washer, figure out how to use my stove, and beat my head against my stereo.

In the mean time, I also gotta figure out who dropped the ball at MCC and didn’t order my books for my course, and finish building my courses that Shelley is also teaching, go to two meetings this week about my extra duties at work, and I need to figure out how to drop a duty, but don’t know which one, and lastly I need to learn to not write run-ons because I yell at my kids when they do.

Forgive the cross posting, but I am excited about the publication of my first real single author publication. Click here to read the post.

In June my family & I took Claire to Disneyworld in Orlando, FL. My sister had her Sony camera with her that my father gave her. After clicking the first photo of Claire with some random person dressed up like some random Disney character, Meghan dropped the camera to the asphalt. It immediately jammed and would not zoom. I understood the problem and explained to her that she was out of luck. Meghan was annoyed that her camera was destroyed, but I explained that we all had cameras and she’d still get photos. I also told her that I would send it away to fix it. I’d sent two other cameras in for repair over the years, and I had an idea how get the company to fix a digital camera.  She finally agreed.

I took the camera home and quickly forgot I had it for about a month. I then remembered it was there, called Sony, got a repair code, and mailed it in. At the time I was buying somethings online, so lots of stuff was coming in and going out. Consequentially, I forgot all about Meghan’s little Sony digital camera.

About five weeks later I was tucking Claire into bed and suddenly remembered the camera. I went out and asked Donna if she’d seen a box from Sony. Something sent back to us from the Laredo, TX repair center? She said she hadn’t. I was pretty worried about the $300+ camera, and I knew that Sony ships via UPS. Wanna know what I think of UPS? I can only say the company’s color is not a coincidence! The checked GMAIL and found an email from a month earlier from Sony saying it was being sent back. I get 100+ emails daily, so I just must’ve missed this one. I put the tracking number into the UPS site and it said it was delivered several weeks ago.  I went to bed that night unhappy and worried. I wanted to call Sony immediately but it was late. The next day I called UPS and they weren’t any help. They said it was Sony’s fault not there’s. This made no sense since Sony said they sent it, and they had a tracking number. UPS told me that Sony had to initiate any lost package claim. So I called Sony. Sony said they had no idea what I was talking about, and if it was anyone’s fault then it was the Laredo, TX repair center’s fault. The lady put me on hold and tried to call them. She quickly came back and told me they weren’t answering and I’d have to call them myself. I don’t even think she had time to dial a number in Texas.

I quickly thanked her, scribbled down the number, and thought about how I would nail them on the customer service survey. I didn’t care to talk to anymore Sony idiots today, so I shoved the number in my pocket and went about my job. Later that day, I pulled into our driveway and walked around the front sidewalk. I pushed back the edge of our bush next to the front door. Low and behold, a tattered, moist, dirty UPS box sat under the bush near the door. Oops.

Today hell froze over. It’s been coming for sometime, but it officially froze today. Yep… BRR!!! Got up this morning and headed over to Cracker’s Breakfast Cafe with Claire & Donna. It was good as always, and if you live in Arizona, you gotta try Cracker’s. But that was only chilly. It got downright frozen when the three of us headed to Costco afterwards. The other evening Donna and Claire were home alone and the television picture went black. I remind her daily that it wasn’t my fault since I wasn’t home, so she couldn’t say I did it on purpose. I checked out a couple of websites and called Toshiba, but everyone pretty much said we were SOL.

The next day Claire & I trudged off to CostCo because we already knew we were buying there, and we took inventory. The Vizio 42" 1080P jumped out at me, and I was pretty comfortable with that; the price was also exactly what I expected. My next problem was figuring out how it would fit in my entertainment center. We got this beast when we got married, spent an arm and a leg, and Donna isn’t giving it up. So I deferred to Terrie, the most handy person I have around. See, the problem was that our entertainment center is 37" wide, and all of these new televisions are all too large. I wasn’t about to buy a smaller television, and I knew I was getting 1080P no matter what. Terrie said, "well, why don’t you just cut windows in each side?" This idea was brilliant!


Sunday morning we headed off to CostCo, and I showed Donna the television. She suggested the 37", but it was only a 720P so we grabbed the Vizio Claire and I picked out, got some cables, a power surge and groceries. I came home, moved the old CRT beast out of the cabinet, cleaned stuff off the shelves that could break, and then we called Terrie. She had just gotten home from the cabin and promised she’d be over in a few hours. I ran around and did other work, while we waited.

When she arrived, she dumped her tools in the living room and we got to work. We measured out window holes for the sides of the television, and then got out the drill. We used a jigsaw to cut the holes out, and then a sander to take care of the jagged edges. Afterward, we cracked open the box and fit the television into the center. I clicked it on and it was good. Later we got the sound hooked up, and I popped in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. WOW! What a beauty! Gotta call Cox about an HD box tomorrow now.